Short of friends and on the nose

Paola Totaro was the only Australian journalist to accompany the PM on one of his last campaign train trips.

IT'S 6.30am and London's Waterloo station is a mess of grim-faced commuters, haphazard trolleys piled high with produce and the occasional exhausted traveller.

The shops have yet to open but already a small group is chatting outside Marks & Spencer. At 7.16, the group springs to attention and cameras and flashes ''kerchek'', ''kerchek'', ''kerchek'' in frenetic unison. The Prime Minister has arrived and is making his way to the 7.30am fast train to Southampton on the south coast.

Gordon Brown, hair damp and brushed neatly like a schoolboy, seems to have a spring in his step. God knows why, when gaffes and voter cynicism have the polls pointing ever southward. Beside him strides his wife, Sarah, tall, and blessed with cheekbones that are the chiselled antithesis of her husband's Deputy Dawg jowls and dark-eyed pessimism tinged with saintly patience.

Mr Brown is just days from the election that will define, or end, his political career. Tony Blair's former chancellor has spent 13 years next door to, or in, Number 10 Downing Street and the fate of New Labour and the party's role in the history books lies with him.

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Just three years ago, he squibbed it, failing to call a snap election at the height of his popularity. Then came the global credit crash, the MPs' expenses row and the collapse in the British public's faith in its political class. He has paid dearly for, and probably regretted ever since, his lack of courage.

The truth is that Mr Brown probably does not have politics in his DNA the way Mr Blair did. He is a policy wonk, a former university lecturer who is more at home with numbers and backroom strategy than the hail-fellow-well-met small talk or polished telegenic charm that is required of modern leaders.

Mr Brown may well find that if his retirement is coming, a fine new life may come with it.

But on the train to Southampton, he wasn't countenancing such a future, admitting he'd toyed with thoughts of the Australian election of 1993 when Paul Keating defied the odds and a hostile media and won his ''sweetest victory of all''.

''Oh yes, that was the election that people said would be fought on personality and style, and instead it was fought on a debate about the economy,'' he told The Age. ''It was won on a debate on the economy … I think we will surprise you with our determination to get that message across.''

The problem with Labour's message, of course, is that the mainstream British press simply doesn't want to hear it. To Australian eyes at least, the level of blatant political bias in the media is always apparent. But it has become more ferocious since Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg emerged as the star of the TV debates and a credible third political force.

The Tory papers - The Times, The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail among others - have raged against Mr Clegg, dishing dirt even when there was no credible mud to sling, with The Sun even running a page-3 girl who warned against a hung parliament and ''Italian-style'' coalition governments.

Sky TV's wayward radio microphone and the ''bigotgate'' brouhaha that exploded midweek simply prompted the press opprobrium to turn back to Labour where it has been focused pretty much since Mr Brown replaced Mr Blair.

Labour has tried feverishly to claw back support wherever it can in the face of a hostile media. The left-leaning Guardian, for example, had a photographer on board the train who, it turned out, was embedded with Labour - given exclusive, intimate access in return for positive pictures. (This became clear after an earlier contretemps when Mr Brown's apparatchiks turned to what they expected to be a two-page photographic spread in The Guardian and found not their beleaguered leader but an underwater shot of a giant carp caught on the hook of a French fisherman. Access was later reinstated when a flurry of emails revealed that the fish was the result of a Sunday newsroom cock-up as opposed to media conspiracy.)

In Mr Blair's time - when Alastair Campbell was managing Labour's PR machine - international media wouldn't have got a look-in during a campaign. After all, there are no votes in foreign press. But this time, The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and The Age were allowed on board. It is as if Gordon Brown, drowning electorally at home, has decided to look out to the rest of the world for a helping hand.

''It's time to push to policy and to go beyond the excitement of the [TV] debates,'' he urges wishfully, arguing that the vast swath of voters who are still undecided will make up their minds on policy, not on who would make the next ''best presenter of Question Time'', the BBC's flagship political show.

A flurry of questions are answered diligently and relatively coolly until someone asks why he is travelling to places where Mr Brown appears to be preaching to the converted and not meeting ''real voters''.

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''You guys are just looking for someone who might throw an egg,'' he laughed.

Less than 36 hours later, a pensioner named Gillian Duffy, inadvertently does just that.